Will say though, as a former writer on The Blacklist, we didn't really send Agnes to Mandyville, in the same way that Mandy just up and disappeared. We showed on-screen (509 "Ruin," that Sean Hennen wrote) that she was taken in by Scottie Hargrave. I thought it was a good move -- honestly it just made sense to stash the baby somewhere, what with all the shit that went down after.

Screenwriting can be like baseball. Say you're a pitcher and you want to go pro. You've been playing seriously for about eight years, and your fastball is 92 MPH -- and you can hold that speed consistently for eight innings.

I'm a scout in charge of recruiting for the dodgers. It's my job to answer: is this person ready for the pros? Today I'm evaluating you and a 12 year old who's dad is the owner's lawyer.

The 12 year old goes first. He pitches a fastball at 50 mph.

You go second. You pitch twenty perfect fastballs at 92 mph.

In my report, I evaluate the 12 year old's readiness for the pros as a 0 out of 100. I evaluate your readiness for the pros as a 0 out of 100.

Because, you can't pitch in the pros if your fastball is 92 (unless you're Bartolo Colón -- baseball superfans, I know this is a strained analogy). I'm giving you both zeros because neither you or the kid are ready to succeed in the pros yet.

But that doesn't mean that even though you and the kid scored a zero that you are both the same distance from going pro as one-another. Does this make sense? After your years of hard work, you are much much closer to being able to play at the pro level -- it may be that you are 6 months or a year away from throwing 95 or 96 mph, and subsequently scoring a 78 on my little pretend evaluation.

My point is that there is a ton of work, for me it was about 10 years, between starting to write pretty well and writing at the level at which I could get paid 6 figures to write. And in my experience, often if someone writes their first "professional-level" script, the script right before that was not really that close. And the script they wrote two scripts ago? It might have been outwardly awful.

I think the thing before the thing for me, maybe my tenth script, even my wife was like, "uhhh... I guess it was pretty good." And then, almost out of the blue, one day the pieces fell into place and it was working.

You've chosen to pursue something that's very hard. That's one of the things that's wonderful about this stuff. It's not easy, and it takes a ton of time to get good. It's discouraging, though, when we work so hard for so long, and we're still not there yet. But I strongly encourage you to not give up right now.

Like Ira Glass says, you are currently feeling the pain of the gap. And the only way to close the gap, to fight your way through it, is to do more work. But you might be closer to where you want to be than you think.

One thing happening in this "beers" clip is a TON of exposition in dialogue.

"I'm practicing my clarinet for when my cousin CJ gets here."

"Oh yeah. Think he'll be able to take care of our fish when we go on our bike ride tomorrow?"

"I hope so. CJ loves fish."

In the next scene, notice how when Larry David enters, Kyle says "CJ" and Beck literally says, "my cousin CJ"

And then later: "Cousin CJ, can we ask you something?" "Why not? I am your cousin CJ, after all"

All this is a parody of the way sitcoms convey information needed to understand the situational premise of the scene verbally in a clear and un-ambiguous way. In your script, I'd think about the comedic premise of the fake show, and then think, "what are the things the audience would have to know to get the situation? How could that be conveyed in the least subtle, most explicit way possible?"

On my show, we never write the word 'montage' in scene description. A more modern approach to a longer "end of act 6" tv montage (like the end of every episode of Grays Anatomy) would be to write something like:

MUSIC UP --

and then just slug everything normally and keep it short.

For what you're describing, you could also write something like --

MUSIC UP, leading us to a SERIES OF SHOTS -- as the girls TRAIN, we watch them GROW UP before our very eyes:

-- The girls lifting weights, sweating as they work hard ---- The girls (12 years old now), working a heavy bag, already incredibly skilled-- The girls, now 19 years old, deadlifting truck tires like they're nothing.

I would start by just free-writing about the theme from as many angles as possible. My preference for this stage would be to write longhand in a notebook. As a jumping-off point, just write as much volume as possible, do it in sprints where you never stop your pen moving and never erase.

When you begin to run out of steam (could take an hour or weeks, depending), some more questions to free-write on would be:

"Why is this theme so interesting to me? This theme is interesting to me because..." And then start writing. Whenever you get stuck, start over with "This theme is interesting to me because..."

"What are some characters that are floating around in my mind related to this theme?"

"What are some ways people might lie to themselves related to this theme?"

"What are some hard choices people might make that relate to this theme?"

Write as much as possible, this is about creation initially.

Then, when you're ready (or just exhausted), go back to the beginning of you writing and go through it. See if you can spot the most interesting or resonant parts. Maybe things come up over and over again; maybe something is just written once but you know it's it.

Just kind of digest it. Maybe use a highlighter to flag things you think are interesting.

I think at that point you will have plenty of raw material to start thinking about story. What characters are calling to you? What external problems might really challenge them and force them to change?

Hope this helps.

Edit to add: this is a sincere question, and the sarcastic/condescending "answers" in this thread truly bum me out.

Many of the incoming numbers are static numbers that use forwarding services set to route calls through various numbers before the handset itself rings. In other words, the number Kate dials is not the phone number of the handset Dembe is holding at the time; but she knows if she calls that old number, it will ring through to the 'current handset'.

This isn't canon by any means because we've never explicitly established it. But that's how it works in my head.

Your friend is wrong, you are right. It's like swimming -- everyone sucks at first, the only way to get better is to practice. Swimming theory might help you progress faster, but 90% of it is time spent actually in the pool. No one who has read 10 swimming books but has never been in water knows how to swim, and the idea that learning more until you're "ready to swim" might make some logical sense in a way but practically speaking it's completely incorrect.